humour

This is a really old idea – but it’s the first time I’ve seen it illustrated.

(The obvious flaw in the concept appears  in comment 22.)

For those of us acquainted with the philosophical works of Douglas Adams we know that the the answer to everything is 42.

mdw1123> select all knowledge from everything
  2  /

 KNOWLEDGE
----------
        42

This above is a real SQL statement (version 11.2.0.3, just in case you wanted to know ).

Christmas time for sysadmins who’ve been naughty.

For many, today is the last working day before Christmas and the festive season – So I sincerely wish upon everyone a Merry Christmas.. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, well the intent of my wishes still holds – I hope everyone; whether working or not; religious leanings for, against or indifferent; has an enjoyable few days during whatever end-of-year festives you have.

I’m going to be miserably now. You might want to stop reading here and maybe go to the shops for that last spell of retail hell or some other Christmas tradition. It’s probably best if you do…

I don’t carry business cards around with me. I just never, ever think to get some done (either properly or with my trusty printer) and maybe this says something about my personal failings to sell myself. If anyone wants to contact me I tell them my email address and if they look confused I just say “ahh, Google me”. You see, having a very odd Surname means I am easy to find. {Reading this back I guess it could be interpreted as saying “I am so famous you will find me” but that is way, way, way from my meaning – I am going on the very unusual name that I have and nothing other than that!}

A while back I was asked by a friend to blog about being a contractor. In the pub last week my friend reminded me of this and that I had not obliged him. I will – think of this as instalment one Jason…

I’ve been a contractor on and off for 18 years. For anyone not familiar with the concept, it is where you are self-employed and you simply hire yourself out to a company for a period of time or to do a specific job. You generally have less job security than an employee and less rights and benefits – No holiday pay, no paid sick leave, no annual pay increase {OK, so that one is rare for employees too these days}, no training and generally the first out the door when the money gets tight. In return you get more money when working and a lot, lot less to do with office politics, HR, annual reviews and the like.

It is not for everyone but I like being a contractor. It gives me a broader degree of experience.

I like it apart from one main thing.

I got pinged by someone else missing the Friday Philosophy today {BTW, Good news, the technical blogs start again on Monday}, so…

Take a look at the below. It is a rather pleasant spot of countryside on Sao Migel in the Azores, where the area in the foreground has been converted into a bit of a garden to take advantage of the natural beauty.

Alternative title “The lady from Patient Admin – she says YEEESSSS!!!!!!”

What must you always achieve for an IT system to be a success?

• Bug free? Never happens.
• Within budget/time frame? That would be nice.
• Includes critical business functionality? Please define critical.
• Secure? Well, it’s important for many systems but then it is often lacking (even when it is important).
• That it is to specification? Well we all know that’s wrong.

There is only one thing that an IT system must always achieve to be a success.

User Acceptance.

For an individual system other considerations may well be very important, but the user acceptance is, I think, non-negotiable.

Oracle Tuning is all about technical stuff. It’s perhaps the most detail-focused and technical aspect of Oracle Administration there is. Explain Plans, Statistics, the CBO, database design, Physical implementation, the impact of initialisation variables, subquery factoring, sql profiles, pipeline functions,… To really get to grips with things you need to do some work with 10046 and 10053 traces, block dumps, looking at latching and queueing…

But I realised a good few years ago that there is another, very important aspect and one that is very often overlooked. People and their perception. The longer I am on an individual site, the more significant the People side of my role is likely to become.

Here is a little story for you. You’ll probably recognise it, it’s one that has been told (in many guises) before, by several people – it’s almost an IT Urban Myth.

When I was but a youth, not long out of college, I got a job with Oracle UK (who had a nice, blue logo back then) as a developer on a complex and large hospital system. We used Pyramid hardware if I remember correctly. When the servers were put in place, only half the memory boards and half the CPU boards were initiated. We went live with the system like that. Six months later, the users had seen the system was running quite a bit slower than before and started complaining. An engineer came in and initiated those other CPU boards and Memory boards. Things went faster and all the users were happy. OK, they did not throw a party but they stopped complaining. Some even smiled.

I told you that you would recognise the story. Of course, I’m now going to go on about the dishonest vendor and what was paid for this outrageous “tuning work”. But I’m not. This hobbling of the new system was done on purpose and it was done at the request of “us”, the application developers. Not the hardware supplier. It was done because some smart chap knew that as more people used the system and more parts of it were rolled out, things would slow down and people would complain. So some hardware was held in reserve so that the whole system could have a performance boost once workload had ramped up and people would be happy. Of course, the system was now only as fast as if it had been using all the hardware from day one – but the key difference was that rather than having unhappy users as things “were slower than 6 months ago”, everything was performing faster than it had done just a week or two ago, and users were happy due to the recent improvement in response time. Same end point from a performance perspective, much happy end point for the users.

Another aspect of this Human side of Tuning is unstable performance. People get really unhappy about varying response times. You get this sometimes with Parallel Query when you allow Oracle to reduce the number of parallel threads used depending on the workload on the server {there are other causes of the phenomena such as clashes with when stats are gathered or just random variation in data volumes}. So sometimes a report comes back in 30 minutes, sometimes it comes back in 2 hours. If you go from many parallel threads to single threaded execution it might be 4 hours. That really upsets people. In this situation you probably need to look at if you can fix the degree of parallelism that gives a response time that is good enough for business reasons and can always be achieved. OK, you might be able to get that report out quicker 2 days out of 5, but you won’t have a user who is happy on 3 days and ecstatic with joy on the 2 days the report is early. You will have a user who is really annoyed 3 days and grumbling about “what about yesterday!” on the other 2 days.

Of course this applies to screens as well. If humans are going to be using what I am tuning and would be aware of changes in performance (ie the total run time is above about 0.2 seconds) I try to aim for stable and good performance, not “outright fastest but might vary” performance. Because we are all basically grumpy creatures. We accept what we think cannot be changed but if we see something could be better, we want it!

People are happiest with consistency. So long as performance is good enough to satisfy the business requirements, generally speaking you just want to strive to maintain that level of performance. {There is one strong counter-argument in that ALL work on the system takes resource, so reducing a very common query or update by 75% frees up general resource to aid the whole system}.

One other aspect of Human Tuning I’ll mention is one that UI developers tend to be very attuned to. Users want to see something happening. Like a little icon or a message saying “processing” followed soon by another saying “verifying” or something like that. It does not matter what the messages are {though spinning hour glasses are no longer acceptable}, they just like to see that stuff is happening. So, if a screen can’t be made to come back in less than a small number of seconds, stick up a message or two as it progresses. Better still, give them some information up front whilst the system scrapes the rest together. It won’t be faster, it might even be slower over all, but if the users are happier, that is fine. Of course, Oracle CBO implements this sort of idea when you specify “first_n_rows” as the optimizer goal as opposed to “all_rows”. You want to get some data onto an interactive screen as soon as possible, for the users to look at, rather than aim for the fastest overall response time.

After all, the defining criteria of IT system success is that the users “are happy” -ie accept the system.

This has an interesting impact on my technical work as a tuning “expert”. I might not tune up a troublesome report or SQL statement as much as I possibly can. I had a recent example of this where I had to make some batch work run faster. I identified 3 or 4 things I could try and using 2 of them I got it to comfortably run in the window it had to run in {I’m being slightly inaccurate, it was now not the slowest step and upper management focused elsewhere}. There was a third step I was pretty sure would also help. It would have taken a little more testing and implementing and it was not needed right now. I documented it and let the client know about it, that there was more that could be got. But hold it in reserve because you have other things to do and, heck, it’s fast enough. {I should make it clear that the system as a whole was not stressed at all, so we did not need to reduce system load to aid all other things running}. In six months the step in the batch might not be fast enough or, more significantly, might once more be the slowest step and the target for a random management demand for improvement – in which case take the time to test and implement item 3. (For those curious people, it was to replace a single merge statement with an insert and an update, both of which could use different indexes).

I said it earlier. Often you do not want absolute performance. You want good-enough, stable performance. That makes people happy.

A while ago whilst working on one project, a colleague came back to his desk next to mine and exclaimed “I hate working with that team! – they are so bad that it makes everyone who works with them look incompetent!”

Now there is often an argument to be made that working with people who are not good at their job can be great for you, as you always looks good in comparison {it’s like the old adage about hanging around with someone less attractive than you – but I’ve never found anyone I can do that with…}. It is to an extent true of course, and though it can seem a negative attitude, it is also an opportunity to teach these people and help them improve, so everyone potentially is a winner. I actually enjoy working with people who are clueless, so long as they will accept the clues. You leave them in a better state than when you joined them.

However, my friend was in the situation where the team he was dealing with was so lacking in the skills required that if you provided them with code that worked as specified, which passed back the values stated in the correct format derived from the database with the right logic… their application code would still fall over with exceptions – because it was written to a very, very “strict” interpretation of the spec.

In one example, the specification for a module included a “screen shot” showing 3 detail items being displayed for the parent object. So the application team had written code to accept only up to 3 detail items. Any more and it would crash. Not error, crash. The other part of the application, which the same people in the application team had also written, would let you create as many detail items for the parent as you liked. The data model stated there could be many more than 3 detail items. I suppose you could argue that the specification for the module failed to state “allow more than three items” – but there was a gap in the screen to allow more data, there was the data model and there was the wider concept of the application. In a second example, the same PL/SQL package was used to populate a screen in several modes. Depending on the mode, certain fields were populated or not. The application however would fail if the variables for these unused fields were null. Or it would fail if they were populated. The decision for each one depended on the day that bit of the module had been written, it would seem. *sigh*

The situation was made worse by the team manager being a skilled political animal, who would always try to shift any blame to any and all other teams as his first reaction. In the above examples he tried to immediately lay the blame with my colleague and then with the specification, but my colleague had managed to interpret the spec fine (he did the outrageous thing of asking questions if he was not sure or checked the data model). Further, this manager did not seem to like his people asking us questions, as he felt it would make it look like they did not know what they were doing. Oddly enough they did NOT know what they were doing. Anyway, as a consequence of the manager’s hostile attitude, the opportunity to actually teach the poor staff was strictly limited.

That was really the root of the problem, the manager. It was not the fault of the team members that they could not do the job – they had not had proper training, were unpracticed with the skills, siloed into their team, not encouraged to think beyond the single task in front of them and there was no one available to show them any better. The issue was that they were being made to do work they were not able to do. The problem, to my mind, was with the manager and with the culture of that part of the organisation that did not deal with that manager. He obviously did not believe that rule one of a good manager is to look after the best interests of your team. It was to protect his own backside.

But the bottom line was that this team was so bad that anything they were involved in was a disaster and no one wants to be part of a disaster. If you worked with them, you were part of the disaster. So we took the pragmatic approach. When they had the spec wrong, if we would alter our code to cope, we would alter our code. And document that. It gave us a lot of work and we ended up having a lot of “bugs” allocated to our team. But it got the app out almost on time. On-going maintencance could be a bit of an issue but we did what we could on our side to spell out the odditites.

I still know my friend from above and he still can’t talk about it in the pub without getting really quite agitated